ACM KDDCUP 2005 Data Mining Contest: Champion

A HKUST research group has won the championship of the KDD-Cup 2005
Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining competition which is held in
conjunction with the Eleventh ACM SIGKDD International Conference on
Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. The team consists of PG students and
postdoctoral fellows Dou Shen, Rong Pan, Jiantao Sun, Junfeng Pan,
Kangheng Wu and Jie Yin, and their supervisor Prof.
Yang Qiang, a faculty member of the Department of Computer Science at
HKUST.

The ACM KDDCUP is the most rigorous annual competition in the field of
machine learning and data mining. The competition is open to all academic
institutes, industries as well as individuals from around the world. Since
its inception in 1997, the KDDCUP competition has presented some very
practical and challenging data mining problems. Many more researchers and
practitioners participate in the contest over the years, and the KDDCUP
datasets have become benchmarks for the data mining field. ACM KDDCUP
Contest 2005 was held between May and July 2005 by the ACM Special
Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining which was aimed at
solving a difficult and practical problem in Internet search, for the
classification of 800,000 realistic Internet search queries. A good
solution to this problem will help improve the current internet search and
information retrieval technology. Many teams around the world completed
event and 37 solutions were submitted. Solutions include the design and
implementation of algorithms based on artificial intelligence, statistics,
database and information retrieval technologies. This year's tasks are
particularly challenging due to the large size of the search problem and
the lack of training data that are usually given in data mining problems.
The HKUST team used an ensemble based search method that applies machine
learning algorithms innovatively. They won all three prizes set up by the
KDDCUP organizers, including the "Query Categorization Precision Award",
"Query Categorization Performance Award", and the "Query Categorization
Creativity Award". An award ceremony was held on August 21, 2005 in
Chicago, USA.